As Business Intelligence becomes more and more popular as a way for companies to achieve an advantage, some companies ahead of the curve are adopting open source BI software. Analysts have not been positive in their predictions of open source use, but they may be mistaken. Mark Madsen describes the results of his study showing who is using open source BI software, why they're using it, and what the benefits are. His results indicate that while open source BI is not widely accepted yet, its users are just ahead of the curve.

Christine Peterson is a founder and Vice-President of Foresight Institute, and focuses effort on educating the public on nanotechnology issues. In this emotionally-charged presentation at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, Peterson lays out the potential privacy concerns of using nanotechnology and closed-source software to monitor for a future terrorist attack.

MySpace, Flicker, YouTube, and Facebook are big brands and major movers in the commercial, social networking world. In this audio lecture recorded at the 2008 Nonprofit Management Institute, an event convened by the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Jeff Patrick of Common Knowledge shares how nonprofits can use such tools--and customize their own--to capture constituencies and raise funds. He further shows where social networking is headed so that nonprofits can begin to incorporate it into their long-term horizons.

New Web software applications perform and are used differently. Consequently, the hardware and infrastructure of yesterday is insufficient. In this presentation from the O'Reilly Velocity Conference, John Fowler of Sun Microsystems discusses the new Web application architecture components that Sun is working on, and how they work with the latest Web software.

David Glazer says that people are the killer app of the web. That is, finding ways to connect people easily and seamlessly is the next great wave in computing. There are barriers to overcome, but the desire to see it happen is great. In this presentation Glazer offers a snapshot of how we got to this point and where things will need to go from here.

Chris Messina has been an advocate of an open, social Web for many years. In this talk at the Graphing Social Patterns conference, Chris outlines potential problems with the current "walled garden" ideology of the major social networks and how the DiSo project aims to tackle them.

You know you've been there! You're pulling your hair out trying to debug some Javascript code that's making your company's home page crash, but you just can't find the error. Before you end up bald, or balder, then maybe Firebug can offer some help. With a powerful, yet easy-to-use web-site inspector, Firebug can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript. In this session John J. Barton demonstrates Firebug's JavaScript performance analysis and debugging capabilities for dynamic JavaScript web pages.

Three participants in the Utah Open Source Foundation discuss how smaller local computer user groups can build into organizations that reach people in larger areas. They give some background about the foundation and talk about how the Utah Open Source Conference has become a useful way for interested participants to get more involved. They also review some useful methods to start a conference and how best to grow it from year to year.

Timothy Fitz joins Phil and Scott to discuss the concept of Continuous Deployment in software development. He believes that it is better to send out constant small changes, allowing for problems to appear quicker and be solved easier. He gives real world examples of how the process works and also talks about the concept of Lean Startup and how it relates to Continuous Deployment.

At some point while trying to get companies to adopt open source practices, Robert Lefkowitz realized that there was no specific open source software development methodology. In this presentation Lefkowitz discusses how he used Quintilian's Institutes of Oratory as a starting point to establish a framework for software development. With humor and insight, he outlines issues specific to open source, and shows how companies can create exceptional software by embracing a process where errors are not a bad thing.